At 7:22 PM +0000 1/6/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>Where I do have problems is the suggestion that Duffy's poem is not
>connected to issues of class, I can't see how anyone can look at a poem
>which is ostensibly in the 'voice' of an Edwardian/Victorian servant and not
>register the issue of class.
Hi Dave - I wasn't saying that it wasn't connected to class at all: I
was saying that to claim the poem is unthinkingly restating class
stereotypes is to ignore the issue of female desire working within
the poem: which is after all what the poem is "about". It seems to
me impossible to talk about that poem without taking that into
account: and yet your analysis scarcely mentions it, except
dismissively as a tawdry fantasy; nor does it explore the
implications of its presence, which is intended to destabilise the
class assumptions implicit in the poem, as well as the hierachies of
language it plays with. (Btw, if the poem doesn't use the language
of the times, doesn't that suggest that it's a contemporary poem
making a metaphor?)
Your erasure of the presence of that desire is precisely what the
poem is arguing _against_; it's an erasure which has been hallowed by
centuries of Western art, which instates the possessiveness and
ownership of the male eye and the passive nature of the female
(nature, property &c) as exploitable owned object. I'm saying that
the class thing is much more complex in the poem than you're
suggesting, not that it's not there. Hierachies work along many
vectors, not just one: a routine removal of the female as perceiving
subject, or the sentimentalisation of the female, are deeply embedded
habits in our literary canons. But all this has been talked about so
much as to make me yawn saying it, and all that talk sometimes seems
to make no difference to actual behaviours: the same erasures occur
again and again. The latest one to ignite my ire is Michel
Houllebecq's Atomised, which I think is a total fraud of a book (but
you have to read the whole thing to find that out). But that's an
aside.
I quite agree there are much more successful literary workings of
these ideas than this poem, which as Liz says, doesn't really bear
the weight of these discussions very well. I too have problems with
its language... in the end, I don't think it's especially
interesting. But it's only fair to discuss it on its own terms, to
see what it _is_ in fact doing.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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